On the day after BusinessWeek outed Google Voice’s subscriber count, British Telecom’s Ribbit subsidiary launched its “Mobile” offering. While I haven’t been able to trial the service, it appears to be very similar to the Google Voice “Light” rendition that uses “conditional call forwarding” so that subscribers can avail themselves of the Ribbit platform’s many enhanced services, including the ability to route incoming calls to many phone numbers simultaneously or to the system’s voicemail service-which includes automated transcription, SMS notification and delivery as email.

There is nothing exclusively mobile about Ribbit Mobile. In fact, it has restored the ability to establish a “call chain” which rings selected phone numbers sequentially – or skips selected numbers based on preferences entered on the Ribbit Mobile Web site. In addition, Ribbit enables its users to designate which of their numbers appears in a call recipient’s caller ID screen when they originate a call. Google Voice users can acknowledge that this is a pretty big deal (from personal experience, I’ve had to explain to people that I’m not calling them from a Washington, DC, suburb).

One advantage Google Voice has over Ribbit is that it has direct links into a subscribers GMail Contacts. Ribbit counters with easy importation of contacts from Plaxo or Outlook “.CSV” files. Yet, in spite of any speedbumps that Ribbit Mobile users might experience, the service’s impact is destined to be further popularization of enhanced telephony services built atop IP-based networks and enabling to control their features and preferences through a Web browser.

In the spirit of Recombinant Telephony, Ribbit positions its offering as an “open” platform and the developer community has responded by offering five applications in its AppStore.

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